The Bolaven Plateau: Home to Laos' World Famous Coffee and Enchanting Waterfalls

We managed to spend as little time as possible in Pakse, the unexciting gateway city to Southern Laos. Instead we hit up the high altitude of the Bolaven Plateau.

After evading the most obvious of scams at the bus depot, we traveled slowly up onto the flat plateau. We could feel the air become more crisp as we begin to see coffee, tea, and rubber plants growing in the fields surrounding the narrow and surprisingly smooth highway.

The sight of large mats at the side of the road drying fresh picked coffee beans peeked our interest, silently encouraging us to examine the production on a tour the following day.
Our hotel manager seemed friendly enough, that we bluntly asked if he could tour us around for the day and drop us off at the bus station to take our bus into Thailand. He accepted the offer with the fee of $60.00 USD.

First he took us around beautiful coffee plantations. Here we saw different machines that sort the beans. We also took a short stroll between the rows of planted bushes. We learned the following interesting facts about coffee production on the Bolaven Plateau:

-Coffee was first planted here by French colonialists.
-When coffee produced here was first brought to France it was declared “The Champagne of Coffee” and acknowledged as some of the best in the world
-There are three types of coffee produced on the Bolaven Plateau: Arabica, Arabica Typica (mixa), and Robusta
-Each of the three types have a distinct a looking tree with characterizing features
-Coffee plants take 3-5 years to produce beans
-The best coffee is produced from the bean of 8 year old trees
-Coffee plants stop producing beans after 30-50 years
-The Bolaven Plateau produces 20, 000 tons of coffee per year.

After absorbing so many coffee facts we took a short trip down a bumpy stretch of highway into a tea plantation where we actually got to taste some of the tea produced there. It was pretty good!

Lastly, he took us to one of many breathtaking falls in the region. We hiked around the surrounding park that was surrounded by beautiful wildlife, flowers in the backdrop of an enormous waterfall. We sat and soaked up the beauty before heading back to catch a train to Bangkok.